“An army without its baggage-train is lost; without provisions it is lost; without bases of supply it is lost.”
Three things are non-negotiable — gear, food, supply; remove any and the force fails regardless of courage.
Chapter 7 states the three losses in one breath: without its baggage-train, lost; without provisions, lost; without bases of supply, lost. Three separate lines — equipment, sustenance, replenishment — and the failure of any one is total, regardless of courage or numbers. Sun Tzu wrote today’s lesson more than two millennia early: redundancy in the support chain is not overhead; it is existence.
A thriving studio builds its entire operation on one cloud region, one payment processor, and one producer who knows every client relationship. Revenue is diversified; support is triple-pointed. When the payment processor freezes its account for six weeks over a false fraud flag, the "diversified" business discovers it was one line deep all along — brave, numerous, and lost.
Verifying support lines is not hoarding — the army still travels light between them, and Sun Tzu elsewhere warns against baggage obsession. The audit is about essentials only: the two or three lines whose failure ends you. Everything else should be lean, replaceable, even disposable. The discipline is knowing which is which — most companies discover their essentials only by losing one.